1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to recording data, such as music or movies. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to storing the data at the time a subscriber experiences it, such as while listening to a car radio or while watching a movie at a movie theater.
2. Background
There are numerous times when one sees or hears something that he or she would like to store for future use. For example, while driving a car, one may hear a song playing on the car radio that he or she would like to record for future listening. Similarly, in a movie theater, one may hear a song or see a movie that he or she would like to store for future listening or viewing. However, in these and many other circumstances such storage is inconvenient or impossible. For example, in the case of driving a car, systems for recording the music are rare, and to the extent that they exist, they have a significant drawback. That drawback is that the song is not stored from its beginning. Rather, the song is only stored from the time that the subscriber indicates that he or she desires that it be recorded. This is undesirable because the whole song is not recorded. Similarly in a movie theater, there is no way to store the song or soundtrack of the movie at the time it is heard. There are numerous other examples where a person may desire to store data he or she is experiencing, for example, a song playing on the radio, a movie soundtrack, a song in the soundtrack or the movie itself while viewing a movie.
In addition to recording music, people also often desire to store the music in different formats. For example, a person may hear a song on the radio and desire to store the song as a ring tone for a telephone such as a cellular telephone. Conventional systems allow cellular telephone subscribers to select and upload to their cellular telephones various pre-recorded ring tones. Conventional systems further allow cellular telephone subscribers to create or generate their own ring tones. However, such systems do not allow subscribers to store a song that they are currently listening to as a ring-tone or in some other format.